Simon (1953) | A novel of the English Civil War by Rosemary Sutcliff

Of Simon by Rosemary Sutcliff, written some sixty years ago, the Washington Post and Times Herald in the USA (April 4th, 1954) wrote: ‘it is a colourful story…..(and) Miss Sutcliff‘s interest in character makes even the minor characters interesting … she is adept too at communicating a sense of the Devon countryside”. The story?

All of England was taking sides for the King of Parliament in the 1640’s. In the west country the division was bitter as Cromwell gathered his forces for the final, great campaign. The clash of personal loyalties, the severing of friendship, and the bitter strain of the English Civil War of 1642-1660 are reflected in the story of Simon Carey, the farmer’s son who enlists with the Parliamentary forces – the Roundheads, and Amias Hannaford, his boyhood friend, who fights for the Royalist cause. They had the same schoolmaster, went away to the same school, and expected to return home, Simon to help his father farm, and Amias to be apprenticed to his doctor-father. But they parted when King Charles raised his standard in Nottingham, Simon to join the Fairfax Horse in Cromwell’s New Model Army, and Amias to be in the Royalist Foot. It is a story of competing loyalties in a Civil War.

past posts

the guardian, in praise of rosemary sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's classic The Eagle of the Ninth (still in print more than 50 years on) is the first of a series of novels in which Sutcliff, who died in 1992, explored the cultural borderlands between the Roman and the British worlds – "a place where two worlds met without mingling" as she describes the British town to which Marcus, the novel's central character, is posted.

Marcus is a typical Sutcliff hero, a dutiful Roman who is increasingly drawn to the British world of "other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling". This existential cultural conflict gets even stronger in later books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, set after the fall of Rome, and has modern resonance. But Sutcliff was not just a one-trick writer.

The range of her novels spans from the Bronze Age and Norman England to the Napoleonic wars. Two of her best, The Rider of the White Horse and Simon, are set in the 17th century and are marked by Sutcliff's unusually sympathetic (for English historical novelists of her era) treatment of Cromwell and the parliamentary cause. Sutcliff's finest books find liberal-minded members of elites wrestling with uncomfortable epochal changes. From Marcus Aquila to Simon Carey, one senses, they might even have been Guardian readers.